Reconfiguring the Portrait

The book explores the portrait in the era of post-digital media, including painting, photography, film, ethography, literature, music videos, social media, digital apps, and algorithmic facial recognition. It presents the portrait as a media-theoretical concept and traces its practices within diverse sets of material, technological, and media networks. The contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture, and the book includes case studies from France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Canada, and the United States.

Format: Hardback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 31 October 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

In the era of post-digital media, portraiture has undergone a remarkable transformation, embracing a multidisciplinary perspective that extends beyond traditional art forms. This comprehensive volume explores the multifaceted nature of portraiture, encompassing not only painting, photography, and film but also ethography, literature, music videos, social media, digital apps, and algorithmic facial recognition. By adopting a media-theoretical lens, the book delves into the practices of portraiture within diverse material, technological, and media networks.

Drawing together an international array of esteemed and emerging scholars from fields such as media studies, art history, critical theory, science and technology studies, medical humanities, and animal studies, this volume offers a rich tapestry of insights. It examines the stakes of the portrait's resurgence as a canonical genre of identity and representation, challenging long-standing metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.

Through a comprehensive exploration of portraiture across a wide range of media, including literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games, and immersive VR interfaces, the contributors interrogate and transform persistent assumptions about subjects, identity, and representation. They explore the ways in which portraiture functions as a cultural technique for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations, challenging the boundaries between human and non-human, reality and simulation, and presence and absence.

This book serves as a valuable resource for scholars, artists, and anyone interested in the evolving landscape of portraiture in the digital age. It provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex relationships between technology, media, and the human subject, and offers new avenues for artistic experimentation and critical inquiry. By expanding the domain of portraiture beyond its traditional boundaries, this volume contributes to our understanding of the ways in which identity is constructed, contested, and transformed in the contemporary world.

Weight: 616g
Dimension: 161 x 241 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399525077